Sivakumar Sivasubramaniam

About

I am currently Extraordinary Professor and past Head of Language Education Department (LED) in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) South Africa. I serve South Africa's National Research Foundation (NRF) as a Panellist on the NRF Specialist Education Committee in my capacity as NRF's C2 Rated Researcher (in the category of Established Researcher).

I have I have over 40 years of experience as a professional in the field of TESOL/Applied Linguistics/ELT/Language Education (adults). I have worked in various capacities and have served diverse secondary and tertiary institutions in India, Ethiopia, Thailand, Bahrain, Armenia, U.A.E. and South Africa.

In keeping with my intensely value-loaded educational foundations, I take an inclusive view of teaching and research. My teaching and research explore the role of students' agency, voice and intersubjectivity via response-centred reading and writing practices in L2 that draw on the stimuli and synergies that abound in expressive reading and expressive writing. By the same token, I view my research as an antithesis to positivist persuasions that view the teaching and learning of language, especially English, as a psycholinguistic objectivity of inputs and outputs that characterizes it either as a quantifiable cognitive deficit or cognitive deposit.

The courses that I have taught resonate with my interdisciplinary background and its translatability to the accrual, prevalence, permeation and promotion of voice, agency, identity and intersubjectivity of my students. Considering this, I believe that my students felt encouraged to view their learning of English as “a lived through response and as an act of border crossing”, which helped them make sense of their world and self rather than approximating to an asocial linguistic code non-agentively in a conventionalizing and colonizing sense. Likewise, my epistemic stance views research into language learning not as an approximation to a linguistic code, but as a bold act of “border-crossing”, which is fundamental to decolonizing, dehegemonizing and democratizing the use of English with various modes of competence to optimize the prevalence of democratic citizenry and social justice.

I believe that my interdisciplinary background is well-suited to develop some of the most important intellectual and affective process such as internalized knowledge, analogical thinking and inference, perspective taking, empathy, critical analysis and the generation of insight in teaching learning and doctoral supervision practices . These are central to the development of higher order thinking skills and critical literacy of post graduate students, as their agency, voice and intersubjectivity assume centrality, immediacy and primacy in their reading, writing and critical thinking abilities. These, I fervently believe are pivotal to teaching learning practices in any higher education setting.

I have steadfastly exercise my epistemic stance in my: doctoral and MA/M.Ed theses supervisions, publications both single authored and co-authored with my doctoral supervisees, role as former Chief Editor of the Journal of English as an International Language (EILJ), as well as a founding Executive Committee member of English Scholars Beyond Borders (ESBB) and reviewer on the editorial board of the ESBB Journal, a Scopus accredited journal. Likewise, my keynote addresses/plenaries, paper presentations and workshops at international conference forums have continued to resonate with my epistemic stance and its attendant repertoire.

Employment

• University of the Western Cape Extraordinary Professor past Head
  2011 - Present
• The Petroleum Institute( PI) Assistant Professor of Communications.
  2008 - 2011
• American University of Armenia Assistant Professor of TEFL and Director of the Center for Research and Development in Applied Linguisitcs and Language Teaching( CRDALLT)
  2006 - 2008
• University of Bahrain Lecturee in English
  2002 - 2006
• Assumption University Lecturer in English
  1991 - 2002
• Lawrence School, Lovedale Senior Master of English
  1990 - 1991
• Addis Ababa University Lecturer in English
  1986 - 1989
• Indian National School Principal
  1985 - 1986
• Nazereth Teacher Training Institute Teacher Trainer
  1982 - 1985
• Vana Vani School( Affiliated to I.I.T.) Postgraduate Teacher of English
  1980 - 1981
• Rishi Valley School( Krishnamurthy Foundation of India- KFI) English Teacher
  1977 - 1979

Education

• University of Nottingham PhD
  1999 - 2004

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (6)

• Trauma, Injustice and Identity: Investigating an Egalitarian and Autoethnographic Approach to Analysing Students’ Personal Language Narratives (July 2024) Ethics International Press, UK.
  Ethics Press International, U.K. 2024
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• Signposting Foundation Phase teachers’ professional identities in selected Western Cape primary schools, South Africa
  South African Journal of Education 2018 8 citations DOI: 10.15700/saje.v38ns2a1416
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• Investigating the Role of Language in the Identity Construction of Scholars: Coming to Terms with Inter-Cultural Communicative Competence. (July 2016)
  Cambridge Scholars 2016
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• Asian EFL Journal Press, A Division of Time Taylor International.
  Asian EFL Journal Press, A Division of Time Taylor International. 2011
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• Reading Programmes: Issues for Promoting Intersubjectivity in the Classroom
  Extensive Reading in English Language Teaching. 2009
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• Extensive Reading as Semiotic Mediation: a Celebration of Lived through Experiences.
  Extensive Reading in English Language Teaching 2009
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